Seeing Is Believing in Enoch Arden
Miriam Bailin
In Enoch Arden Tennyson declares that "things seen are mightier than things heard."[1] Although this dictum has a certain local validity (Enoch has just peered through a window and seen his wife and children gathered around the hearth with his former rival), it strikes a dissonant note as the culminating assertion of a poem that repeatedly represents the power of "things heard." In the immediate context as well, the "mightiness" of sight relative to sound is qualified by the power imputed to the cry of anguish Enoch suppresses at the sight of his dispossession. He
Staggered and shook, holding the branch, and feared
To send abroad a shrill and terrible cry,
Which in one moment, like the blast of doom,
Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth.
(lines 763–66)
The apparent inconsistency in the poem's expressive preferences draws attention to the long-standing debate in Western aesthetics about the relation and sometime rivalry between the verbal and the visual arts. The subject, always implicit in Tennyson's intensely pictorial poetry, is explicit in his frequent use of ekphrasis, the verbal description of a work of visual art or, in its broader sense, the verbal emulation of any visual experience.[2] Herbert Tucker notes of Tennyson's English idylls (among them Enoch Arden ) that "a certain sisterly rivalry between the visual and verbal arts has typified ekphrastic poetry since Homer. . . . Some such rivalry figures into the competition between pictorial space and descriptive time that inspires . . . all the best of Tennyson's idyllic miniatures."[3]
In Enoch Arden the juxtaposition of pictorial tableau and silenced sound in the crucial scene in which Enoch witnesses his usurpation by "that other, reigning in his place, / Lord of his rights" (lines 759–60), would seem to indicate a tension between competing modes of signification more Oedipal than "sisterly" in character. Karl Kroeber suggests, for instance, that the "hyperbolic repression" of Enoch's cry "may be regarded as a kind of desperate protest against the devocalization of art [in favor of spatial form] toward which the Victorian artist, however reluctantly, is carried."[4]
Despite these muted or overt suggestions of interartistic strife in Enoch Arden, Tennyson invokes the rivalry between "things heard" and "things seen" precisely to insist, to the contrary, that a picture is like a poem and a poem like a picture. Such a claim, in itself, was wholly consonant with the contemporary taste for interartistic experimentation and, according to Martin Meisel, with "the pervasive collaboration of narrative and picture in the culture, as the matrix of a style and as a way of structuring reality."[5] Tennyson himself is credited with the frequent "fusion of the auditory and the visual,"[6] and with "programmatically ignor[ing] such distinctions as Lessing's between the essential temporality of poetry and the spatiality of painting."[7]
I am interested here in what Enoch Arden reveals about Tennyson's stake (and that of the Victorians more generally) in insisting on the convertibility rather than the contention of signifying modes. As I hope to demonstrate, the poem's narrative and descriptive procedures collaborate to suspend all the potential rivalries that the poem invokes—aesthetic, social, economic, sexual, and even evolutionary—and to render them equivalent and interchangeable. The peculiarly Victorian brand of sentimentality that the poem so unabashedly displays and which made it popular throughout Europe, rests upon just such a collaborative effort—the aesthetic shaping by which "potentially aggressive, painful things" are charmed "into acquiescence and friendship."[8] Implicitly at work in this transformation of the aggressive into the acquiescent is the protective severance of the realm of representation from social and economic processes that were marked by arbitrary injustice and by the dissolution of traditional structures.[9] The artificiality of the poem, its highlighting of its status as a poem-picture, signals this divorce between cultural values on the one hand and unassimilable social experience on the other.
The basic story of Enoch Arden has the structural simplicity and inevitability of a ballad. Enoch Arden, a fisherman in a small English seaside village, wins the hand of Annie Lee at the expense of her other suitor,
Philip, the miller's son. A series of untoward circumstances—the development of a larger port to the north, competition with another fisherman ("Another hand crept too across his trade" [line 110]), and an accidental injury—cause Enoch to fail in his trade. Against the wishes and premonitions of his wife he embarks on a China-bound merchant vessel in the hope of bettering their fortunes. Enoch is shipwrecked on the return voyage and spends ten years on a tropical island waiting for a ship to rescue him. Meanwhile Annie, awaiting his return, is wooed after a decent interval by the now prosperous Philip, who has become a second father to Enoch and Annie's two surviving children—a sickly baby died after Enoch's departure. In the tenth year of Enoch's absence Annie consults the Bible for a sign of his fate and opens randomly to the text from Judges that reads, "under the palm tree." When in a dream she sees Enoch sitting under a palm tree, she concludes that he has died and gone to heaven, whereupon she weds Philip and has a child by him. Enoch, rescued at last, returns, broken and bowed, to hear from his "garrulous landlady" about Annie's marriage and then to see his family in their happy home. Vowing not to expose his presence ("Not to tell her, never to let her know" [line 782]) he slowly fades away, leaving instructions to the landlady to tell his story to Annie and his children after his death, but not to let his wife see his "dead face."
Tennyson's rendition of this simple and, by 1864, familiar plot is, according to Walter Bagehot's contemporary (and by no means complimentary) account of it, "a rich and splendid composite of imagery and illustration."[10] Recalling Bagehot's emphasis on the poem's pictorial values, Gerhard Joseph has called Enoch Arden "a veritable gallery of genre paintings."[11] Indeed, the most celebrated of its many descriptive passages—the family tableau presented to Enoch's gaze through the lighted parlor window—would very likely have called to Victorian readers' minds the conversation piece, or informal group portrait, whose long history in Western art has been chronicled by Mario Praz;[12] its Victorian incarnation was ridiculed memorably in Thackeray's Vanity Fair seventeen years before the publication of Tennyson's poem.[13] It is a portrait genre appropriate to Tennyson's reconciliatory aims because it links speech to sight. This is what, stooped in the darkness of Philip's yard, "Enoch saw":
For cups and silver on the burnished board
Sparkled and shone; so genial was the hearth:
And on the right hand of the hearth he saw
Philip, the slighted suitor of old times,
Stout, rosy, with his babe across his knees;
And o'er her second father stoopt a girl,
A later but a loftier Annie Lee,
Fair-haired and tall, and from her lifted hand
Dangled a length of ribbon and a ring
To tempt the babe, who rear'd his creasy arms,
Caught at and ever missed it, and they laughed;
And on the left hand of the hearth he saw
The mother glancing often toward her babe,
But turning now and then to speak with him,
Her son, who stood beside her tall and strong,
And saying that which pleased him, for he smiled
(lines 738–53)
The carefully composed symmetries of the brightly lit scene framed by the window and described from the point of view of the unseen spectator, as well as the allusion to a popular portrait genre, invokes, like much of the poem's imagery, the topos of ekphrasis to which I have already referred. The family scene, presented in this manner, achieves the spatial and temporal fixity of the pictorial; Enoch, in a sense, confronts a representative happy family removed from the harrowing contingencies that have etched themselves so visibly on his own person.[14]
Recent discussions of ekphrastic poetry have stressed its inherent expression of frustration and desire vis-à-vis the object it seeks to translate into language. Wendy Steiner defines ekphrasis as a "stopped moment" in which "a poem aspires to the atemporal 'eternity' of the stopped-action painting or laments its inability to achieve it."[15] Murray Krieger has called it "our unattainable dream of a total verbal form, a tangible verbal space."[16] And W. J. T. Mitchell writes that ekphrastic poetry, which "displaces literary space from the level of inscription to that of description, is . . . obsessed with its spatial object as a figure of utopian desire and funereal mourning."[17] An example of this longing for the "unspeakable other" characteristic of literary pictorialism can arguably be found here in Enoch's desiring and mournful relation to the family tableau, which embodies his ideal of domestic harmony, comfort, and prosperity even as it negates his own existence, and in Tennyson's own poetic aspiration in Enoch Arden to the visual ("things seen")—an aspiration that would seem to negate his own verbal and aural powers.[18]
A comparison with Tennyson's most influential predecessor's more famous example of ekphrasis—"Ode on a Grecian Urn"—however, serves to point up how Tennyson first arouses and then resolutely defuses the form's competitive or frustrating implications. It may also substantiate Karl Kroeber's assertion that the Victorians in general "resisted
the . . . self-contesting uncertainties" of Romantic art.[19] For whereas Keats mines to the full measure of its poignancy the rift that the urn presents to the viewer—between life and art, mutability and permanence, and verbal and visual art—Tennyson suspends the differences that constitute the rift and replaces exclusion and loss with commutability. The insistent voice in Keats's ode that keeps inciting us to interrogate the urn, to contrast what is there with what is not and to elicit the particulars of its legend, is absent in Enoch Arden, and the negations implied by the visual object's omissions affirmed by the communally acclaimed sacrifice of Enoch to the veracity of the tableau's represented reality. Like the picture of Dorian Gray in reverse, Enoch bears the marks of time and fate in order to preserve the picture's appearance of serene immutability. What is lost through Enoch's silence is, in a sense, narrative itself, the story of a particular family enmeshed in a (scandalous) set of circumstances that his cry of pain and rage would set in motion. Even here, however, Tennyson intervenes to ease his reader's desire for full requital, as well as to allay the tensions he invokes concerning the relative powers or expressive capacities of narrative and picture. The Keatsian "little town" never speaks its own absence from the urn, nor do the poet's questions about it get answered ("and not a soul to tell / Why thou art desolate, can e'er return"). But Enoch's story is told in full to "the little port" when that story can no longer complicate or contest the visual representation of the family harmony that enjoined his earlier silence. The protective frame is kept intact, transferred from the spatial tableau to the carefully shaped narrative recited within its posthumous frame by Enoch's landlady. That story, in fact, is what wins Enoch the costly funeral whose sublime vulgarity has been the despair of commentators ever since. Stories may be both shown and told, it seems, as long as their representational modes do not contest each other's cogency or signify each others lack.
In Keats's "Ode" even the scene on the urn itself, "Cold Pastoral" though it is, tells of unfulfilled desire figured in the form of a race. In Tennyson's poem, on the other hand, desire and competition are excluded from both pictorial representation and narrative. Tennyson presents pictorially a vision of achieved familial harmony—a still life with conversation—and narrates a story neatly concluded by deathbed blessings. Only the baby's reach can be said to exceed his grasp as he snatches at the ring and ribbon dangled from his sister's hand. Enoch's painful experience—the treasure he has "caught at and ever miss'd"—is recreated in the tableau as child's play. At every point, Enoch Arden offers in place of struggle, competition, and incommensurate otherness the
stylized deferments and suspensions of the laureate's art: a picture-poem and a poem-picture.
Although the power of the window scene seems to declare the primacy of the visual over speech in the immediacy with which it conveys truth and presence, the poem repeatedly identifies the visual, not with direct apprehension, but with pictorial convention and its stabilizing fixity of impression. The same may be said of Enoch's return, which is revealed not by the visceral cri de coeur with its direct material power to shatter the tableau, but by the posthumous "tale" composed by the landlady in accordance with Enoch's directions. Tennyson's narrative poem as a whole—its formality of diction, its carefully regulated symmetries and redundancies, its distancing temporal frame (the narrator informs us that the poem's events took place a century before) and its allusions to prior versions of the story—repeatedly registers its status as literary artifact just as the window scene announces the pictorial conventions that govern its presentation and reception. The form of the idyll itself, as Robert Pattison has described it in his discussion of Tennyson's sources, is characterized in part by its emphasis on artifice and emotional distance: "The framing device, coupled with the allusive nature of the poetry and its often idealized or decorated situations, compels the work to be studied as artifact instead of as inspiration."[20] Like Annie's biblical signs and dream visions the poem asks to be read as cultural code.
But in an irony that reveals the mediations and silences of art, Annie's allegorical reading is erroneous (Enoch is not dead but literally under a palm tree), and the symmetrically composed relations and static identities of the family tableau are not the whole truth. The marriage is bigamous and the baby illegitimate. "Things seen" in Enoch Arden are no more direct than "things heard," nor, as I have already suggested, does the poem imply that they should be so. The tableau, Annie's dream, and the poem as a whole, depend for their intelligibility, unity of meaning, and affective force on their status as recognizable cultural constructs, even cultural clichés. As Michel Beaujour argues in his discussion of descriptive figures, "both paint-pictures and word-pictures are variants of cultural clichés or commonplaces that transcend, precede or cut across any simple opposition between the visual and the verbal."[21]
Although John Ruskin found Annie's false reading of a true sign the "saddest and strangest thing" in the poem and "so like human life,"[22] Tennyson's poetic style in effect makes that false reading (despite its apparent fortuitousness) fully consistent with, even requisite to, the poem's own hermeneutics. We are encouraged to read verbal pictures as if they figured, if not a transcendent realm of being, then at least the
"atemporal 'eternity' of the stopped-action painting." As Wendy Steiner notes of ekphrastic poetry, its "foiling of narrativity automatically triggers symbolic interpretation."[23] Moreover, the meaning Annie derives, however incorrect, is apposite to time whole poem's reliance, both rhetorically and thematically, on a common cultural store of images and prior texts. (There are, according to P. G. Scott, at least eighteen explicit quotations of the Bible alone.[24] ) Seeing may be believing, but believing—internalized conventions—can also determine what is seen. Underlying Annie's "vertical" exegesis of both dream-vision and text, for instance, is the belief that there cannot be two husbands for one woman, two fathers for one family, two competing significances for one reality. It is not finally important that Annie errs in interpreting her vision, because in so doing she legitimates her own betrothal to Philip, his adoption of her children, and her financial dependence upon him. Her "cultural" reading of the sign wins out over its "true" significance and its profoundly disruptive potential. In any case, description of the island on which Enoch has been stranded as an "Eden of all plenteousness" parallels and thus seems to confirm, if not the letter of Annie's heavenly interpretation, then certainly its spirit. She can hardly be blamed for privileging conventional signs and equivalences in her reading when the poem itself insists on the same methodology to establish its own cultural and emotional legibility.
The overdetermination of structure that characterizes Enoch Arden —part of time ornateness about which Walter Bagehot complained in his famous review of the poem—assists in shaping the equivalences by which the poem suspends and defuses antithesis, competition, and struggle. Juxtaposition replaces sequence, and pervasive parallelisms allow the substitution of persons, places, and signifying modes without any fundamental alteration in the overall scheme of things. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose . The opening lines of the poem both establish this dictum as a narrative principle and exemplify the pictorial values that sustain it.
Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm;
And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands;
Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharf
In cluster; then a mouldered church; and higher
A long street climbs to one tall-towered mill;
And high in heaven behind it a gray down
With Danish barrows; and a hazelwood,
By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes
Green in a cuplike hollow of the down.
These "ostentatiously pictorial" lines could easily be taken for another ekphrastic set piece based on a recognizable genre of painting, in this instance the sentimental picturesque typical of the period.[25] The scene unequivocally invokes the widely recognized and accepted conventions of the picturesque landscape with its characteristic "prospect," its ruins, its foaming torrents and humble dwellings, its contrasting chasms and fertile downs.[26] The picturesque style participates in or, more appropriately, doubles the poem's collaborative strategy by the comforting suspension of antagonistic forces—of transience and continuity, and of the domestic human world and the impersonal forces of nature. The picturesque genre also doubles Tennyson's method by its often-noted capacity to render pleasurable to the eye the social and economic plight of the rural poor.[27] Tennyson's verbal tableau with its participial suspensions of time, its positioning and repositioning of the reader's viewpoint, and its decorative manner of description, all lift the scene out of the temporal scheme that it seems otherwise to insist on. The ephemerality of physical life is presented as a spatial rather than a temporal sequence with the Danish barrows at the top, the moldering church, and the village below. The successive habitations and eras described in the simultaneous present of the descriptive mode reinforce the poem's reassuring premise that each loss is compensated by recurrence and that the nutters will always return to the down. The setting thus achieves the timeless quality of the tableau whose "heightened energy," according to Beaujour, "propels the mimesis of decay into the heaven of cautionary essences."[28] Whatever melancholy is associated with age and decay is incorporated into the fully conventional reception of picturesque composition with its emphasis on emotional effect—specifically, in its mid-Victorian version, on nostalgia for an idealized past.[29] The scene prepares us for both the ruin of Enoch and the endurance in the concluding domestic tableau of the "clean hearth and . . . clear fire" (line 192) he sought to perpetuate by going to sea.
Enoch's gorgeously described tropical island, despite its supposed opposition to the rustic and homely fishing village, shares the latter's picturesque timelessness. Instead of Danish barrows and a chasm to the sea Tennyson describes a "seaward-gazing mountain-gorge" (line 554). And in keeping with the poem's efforts to subdue any suggestion of conflict, the uninhabited island is not the site of "Nature red in tooth and claw" but rather a paradise filled with life "so wild that it was tame" (line 553)! Enoch's island exile is static, composed, and like the family tableau repels through its commanding presence any effort to go beyond or breach its limits. The fate of the two sailors shipwrecked with
Enoch serves as a cautionary tale to that effect. One dies of wounds incurred in the wreck, the other through his frantic attempts to escape: "In those two deaths [Enoch] read God's warning 'wait'" (line 567).
Victorian critics (with the notable exception of Bagehot) praised the sustained descriptive passages of the poem for their realism, for their precise, detailed transcription of visual experience, and for the emotional truth they convey. But the primacy of these passages among the elements that constitute the poetic, narrative, and emotional structure of Enoch Arden rests, not on their overtly referential claims or on their inscription of mood or character, but on their status as artistic representation and, in particular, their own rhetorical identity and procedures as description. They function primarily, in other words, as textual ornamentation, as interventions on causal succession, and as reversible textual units. As Paul Valéry put it, using a telling comparison between description and landscape painting, "the invasion of literature by description was parallel to that of painting by landscape . A description is composed of sentences whose order one can generally reverse: I can describe this room by a series of clauses whose order is not important."[30] In Enoch Arden, by virtue of its densely descriptive form—its verbal spatiality—order is not important. Sentences, narrative sections, even people and their relations to one another are equivalent, reversible, subject to change while remaining, in essence, the same. In the first scene the young Annie, Philip, and Enoch play house, with the boys each playing husband to Annie "turn and turn about." And in a scene that directly parallels Enoch's later despairing view of Annie and his successful rival through the window, Philip watches in mute agony, from a hidden vantage point, as Enoch woos the willing Annie ("Philip looked, / And in their eyes and faces read his doom" [lines 72–73]). In the series of detached set pieces and descriptive morceaux choisis that make up the bulk of the poem's narrative, Annie waits for Enoch, Enoch waits on the island to return to Annie, Philip waits for Annie to turn to him, and finally Enoch waits for death.
Ultimately, as the group portrait presented to Enoch's gaze establishes, Philip can replace Enoch as husband and father; Enoch and Annie's "happy years of health and competence / And mutual love and honourable toil; / With children" (lines 82–84) are replicated in the subsequent marriage; the middle-class prosperity Enoch wanted for his family can be supplied by another man; Philip and Annie's baby can replace Enoch and Annie's dead child, and even the young Annie and Enoch are duplicated in their young son and daughter—"turn and turn about." The implicit Oedipal crisis, and perhaps an incipient Electra
complex in the bargain, are negotiated by the implied redundancy and reversibility of roles and by the poem's spatial configuration of chronological sequence. The issue of who is prior is eclipsed or suspended. In keeping with Adam Smith's warning in The Theory of Moral Sentiments about the difficulty of eliciting our sympathies when they are divided between the sufferer of an injury and the object of his resentment,[31] Philip and Enoch occupy each position in turn. In a final revision of Keats's "Ode," we are informed that essentially a happy family is a happy family—"that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." If, indeed, Keats (with or without his urn) hovers in the background of this poem as in so much of Tennyson's work, we might add to the list of anxieties managed by the poem's structural principle of commutability the shadow cast by the precursor on the laureate's own poetic identity and status. Enoch himself may seem the odd man out in this interchanging of roles, at least on the narrative level, but the poem provides him with a restored relationship that does not interfere with the reconfiguration of the family around Philip. His death augurs a reunion with his dead baby, aptly imagined as an encounter with a visual image: "for I shall see him, / my babe in bliss" (lines 893–94). Tennyson's descriptions may be said to have an explicitly referential rather than rhetorical function only when they duplicate, not nature, but paintings—when, in other words, they replicate interchangeable substitutes for the irreducible and unacceptable "real."
Formal repetitions and parallelisms permit these salutary exchanges to take place, but simultaneity threatens the emergence of a scandalous doubleness or competition for the same space. Enoch Arden thematizes this danger when the substitute momentarily occupies the same space as the substituted for, when Enoch, in other words, is brought into the same perceptual field as Philip, thus menacing the intelligibility of the picture. At the level of story this is bigamy, and at the level of representation, incoherence. Enoch alone has the power to collapse the carefully separated and contained tableaux that defer doubleness, rivalry, and desire and to expose the exclusions upon which they are based. His silence and finally his death secure the legibility and stability of both verbal and (implicitly) visual signs and the relations they seek to stabilize. That Enoch manages, during the course of the poem, to be a fisherman who marries out of his class, a disabled worker unfit for his appointed task, a village tradesman displaced by economic progress and new technologies, a failed merchant capitalist, and an aboriginal man (on the island he becomes an inarticulate "savage") begins to suggest what voices are
silenced, and how thoroughly, to maintain the domestic tableau, the art of the laureate.
Who or what is silenced in the process of securing the status quo is precisely the point and returns us to what, on the face of it, seemed the poem's contradictory assertion that things seen are mightier than things heard. The poem does not privilege the visual representation of Philip's successful usurpation of Enoch's family over the landlady's story that recounts it. Rather, it enlists each representational mode to contain the "unspeakable other" of impulsive, unregulated utterance and sensation, whose potential for destruction is simultaneously invoked and suppressed by Enoch's (unspoken) elemental cry. The cry of the dispossessed and its cataclysmic effects on the idealized Victorian family toward which it is directed are verbally present in the lines of the poem but are neither heard nor seen. The picture remains in its protective frame, the violent exposure of its mendacities contained within the poem as a fiction.
Tennyson, in a sense, not only recasts the frustration of the ekphrastic moment in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" as complacency but also rewrites Frankenstein's outraged monster as a martyr to domestic tranquillity. Like Mary Shelley's primitive man spying on the De Lacey family, Enoch, "so brown, so bowed,/So broken" (lines 699–700), spies on a family scene and experiences his own longing and sense of exclusion from the sentimental portrait of domestic loyalty and affection. But, whereas the monster—a product of the Romantic milieu and marginal status of his author—gives way to rage and revenge, "like a wild beast that had broken its toils,"[32] Enoch, in accordance with the Tennysonian revision of Darwin, was so wild that he was tame. The forms of exclusion and the violence of cultural interdiction are both expressed and elevated by the voluntary subjection of the disempowered ("the strong heroic soul" [line 909]) to the cultural domination of the unified composition. If the willing sacrifice of the excluded members of Victorian society offered its satisfactions, one may assume that the apparently seamless transformation of private failure into public triumph had its own comforting effect on an audience for whom economic failure and a steep decline in status were always a haunting possibility. In this sentimentalized version of the free market wheel of fortune there are no losers—everyone is compensated for loss. (In another rhetorical figure that neutralizes conflict, the litotes, Tennyson assures us that Enoch, having ceded his identity and status to Philip, "was not all unhappy" [795].)
If the poem exposes the artifice of social stability and public art, and
perhaps registers a mute protest against what Kroeber calls the poet's "loss of an effective voice, "[33] it also ratifies the necessity of the silence it enjoins. Enoch's repressed cry is represented as both impotence and heroic sacrifice. His silence and death expose the deathly silences of this hyperpictorial poem, but they also ensure his reemergence into the verbal and visual field. Only with Enoch's death—his final silencing—can his story be told and his presence acknowledged. Those much-maligned final lines of the poem, "And when they buried him the little port / Had seldom seen a costlier funeral," have a fitness beyond their ironic reprise of the economic motive that constitutes a persistent theme of the poem. Enoch can complete rather than compete with the family portrait when he, too, is safely incorporated into a tableau carefully arranged to invoke a culturally prescribed set of responses. Made respectable beyond his fondest dreams, and not by chance or inheritance but by his own moral rectitude, Enoch becomes the cynosure of all eyes in the costly spectacle of a Victorian funeral.